Basalt
How do you launch a brand in a market built on trust?
It's a question we get asked often and one we answered by working with Basalt.
The context: life insurance savings plans are the French public's favorite investment vehicle. More than 19 million people hold one, and total assets under management now exceed 2,000 billion euros (France Assureurs, 2025).
And yet it's also one of the most poorly understood financial products out there.
It comes wrapped in misconceptions ("it's a death benefit policy," "it's only for passing on your estate," and so on), and many policyholders can't say precisely what their contract contains, what it costs them, or why they chose it over another.
That lack of clarity is what pushed David and Antoine to create Basalt, the right life insurance contract. A contract that's clear, complete, and competitive, one you can finally understand, choose, and hold on to knowing exactly what you're doing.
Their first challenge was a simple one to state: earn the trust of an audience that doesn't know them yet.
To get there, we built their brand foundation (strategy, verbal and visual expression) around two requirements.
Credibility, to reassure
When you ask someone to place their savings with you, claiming to be better isn't enough. Especially when 6 out of 10 savers make their decision on the recommendation of an advisor or someone close to them (AMF, Baromètre de l'épargne et de l'investissement, 2024). In the messaging, the challenge was to bring the kind of proof that reassures, without slipping into jargon reserved for insiders. We also didn't want Basalt to be "the new guys" breaking the codes of life insurance for the sake of shaking things up, but the ones moving those codes forward, making life insurance more desirable and better matched to what savers actually expect.
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Character, to create preference
Once credibility is in place, you still have to be chosen. Without personality, a brand becomes interchangeable, and the decision often ends up coming down to price. That's all the more true in financial services, where more than 40% of consumers say they see no difference between brands (UserTesting, Digital Banking Trends Report, 2026). To create that differentiation at first glance, we built a visual identity composed mainly of illustrated scenes of urban life. Generated by AI and inspired by oil painting, they depict calm, optimistic moments, a way of translating the sense of ease that comes from having made the right choice for your life insurance.
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